NVIDIA Tesla and CUDA Technologies Transform the Oil and Gas Industry

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Houston-based SeismicCity announced today that it is using NVIDIA(R) Tesla(TM) S1070 1U systems for Reverse Time Migration (RTM) -- one of the most advanced seismic imaging techniques ever used by the oil and gas industry. SeismicCity selected the NVIDIA Tesla S1070 as it offered the fastest and most scalable implementation to run these complex algorithms enabling discovery of new oil and gas reserves faster.

"Last year, SeismicCity migrated its depth imaging system from a 1,000- core CPU based configuration to a configuration based on NVIDIA Tesla 1U systems," said Claude Pignol, vice president of technology at SeismicCity. "NVIDIA's advancements in GPU Computing are a major breakthrough. Transitioning to GPUs has given us a 10-20X performance boost, but more importantly, GPUs allow us to use computationally-intensive algorithms that we simply couldn't process with CPUs. This is a huge advancement which allows us to use RTM and other more accurate but data-intensive algorithms for larger datasets."

Speaking to the scalability of NVIDIA Tesla, Fatmir Hoxha, vice president of research and development at SeismicCity said, "We've measured automatic performance gains by switching from the Tesla S870 1U to the new Tesla S1070 1U systems due to the increase in cores and the larger device memory provided in the latest generation Tesla 10-series systems. This was without a single modification to the CUDA-based software. We have never seen seamless performance gains without re-coding and re-optimization."

With an increased need to boost domestic U.S. oil production coupled with a tenfold increase in seismic datasets in the last 3 years, there has never been a more important time for the oil and gas industry to explore new ways of discovering new reserves.

NVIDIA is the first to market with production implementations of GPU-based accelerators that enable specialized seismic processing; tasks that are resource-prohibitive on CPU-based clusters. Each Tesla 10-series processor has 240 cores, providing 1 Teraflop of processing power, along with 4GB of onboard memory. The new NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1U system features four Tesla 10-series processors -- for a total of 960 cores and 4 Teraflops of processing power.

NVIDIA is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce(R) graphics products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro(R) graphics products, and the high- performance computing market with its Tesla(TM) computing solutions products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, the impact of NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1U systems and NVIDIA GPUs on the Reverse Time Migration and the availability of NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1U systems, are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of faster or more efficient technology; the impact of technological development and competition; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems; as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended July 27, 2008. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

Copyright(R) 2008 NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, GeForce, Tesla, and Quadro are trademarks or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.